The Decade in Politics
1999
The most recent period of anti-teen sentiment has been gaining ground ever since
Nirvana made angst and conformist non-conformity cool again, but if you wanted to pick
the one year that everything finally gelled, it would be 1999. It was the year of the
Columbine shootings, the year of no-holds-barred reality television. The year of sex and violence on the
Internet, the year of the slasher film.
It was also the year Generation Y began going to college; Generation Y the driven,
fiscally conservative, socially liberal kids who mock their Gen X forebearers as
slackers, all the while toiling away in parent-induced 18-hour days, going from school
to soccer to band practice to tutoring sessions. Oddly, they are at once the product and the bane of
late-model baby boomers, as it's in this
stress-filled lifestyle that so many psychologists see the seed of explosive,
Columbine-like behavior.
What's amazing is that none of these trends, taken by themselves, is new. School
shootings, even white middle-class school shootings, have been going on for years.
Violent video games are just this generation's Judas Priest and Metallica, pop-culture
media thought to edge young boys toward violent behavior. And socially aspirant parents have
always driven their kids to succeed. But it was 1999 that all the pieces of the
teenager-as-deviant puzzle came together.
The contrast between 1999 and, say, 1993 is striking. When I was a junior in high
school, black trenchcoats and moody demeanors may have marked you as a loser, but that
was about it. Five years later, the same traits marked you as a nut-case and potential
classroom assassin. Five years ago, you suffered the collective inattention of the
school community; in a post-Columbine world all spotlights were on you. Whole new
technologies of surveillance and deterrence were deployed against you, so that if you
dared even to express a little anger about all this fuss it was your ass being hauled
away.
Maybe the most ironic part of all this is that just as we are turning on the video
cameras and metal detectors against teens, we are also cashing in on them. They may be
a generation of guns and bombs, but they are also the generation of Britney Spears and
Sony Playstations. They are the 1990s writ large, a decade of unprecedented economic
optimism and consumer confidence, a decade of enormous cars and endless shopping.
In the end, you can't help but wonder if all of this isn't somehow insidiously related,
if our belief that money can buy everything, even better kids, isn't somehow directly
responsible for the occasional violent lash out. Or, more fittingly, whether the kids
are all right after all, and it's the parents, the slave-driving Ivy-League-seeking
parents who act more like secretaries or publicity agents than loving caretakers, who,
in the end, bear the blame.
— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)
